This Virtual Reality Game Is Designed to Help Scientists Spot Dementia

There’s a new reason to enter virtual reality, and it’s not to play ping pong or check the weather. A game designed to help diagnose dementia is coming to virtual reality, as CNET and the BBC report.

Sea Hero Quest, a game designed to test players’ ability to navigate, is now available for Oculus and Samsung Gear. Trouble navigating is one of the first signs of dementia, and the game (which was created by neuroscientists and funded by Deutsche Telekom) collects anonymous data on users’ ability to navigate through complicated pathways while captaining a virtual boat. It’s not designed specifically to be played by people with dementia, but rather to test the navigational skills of the population as a whole. The goal is to eventually be able to diagnose dementia far earlier than currently possible, perhaps by as much as 15 years.

Sea Hero Quest already claims to be the largest dementia study in history, with 3 million players so far. It can generate 15 times more data in virtual reality than in the mobile game, according to its developers, because it can capture eye-tracking movements and the movements of the boat within the game. Virtual reality can also support established tests developed for lab settings, like the often-used spatial learning task known as the Morris water maze.

The addition of virtual reality makes the process that much faster, adding a much larger dataset to what the scientists are already working on. They estimate that two minutes of gameplay generates the same amount of data as five hours in the lab.

This isn’t the first scientific foray into virtual reality. Researchers are also using it to explore sites for jaguar habitats, among other applications.